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Thursday, August 16, 2012

Consider any quality: Physical,
intellectual, emotional, economic, social, spiritual. Create any
grading scale of that quality that you feel suitable. Start placing
the members of the human population at various grades. You are well
likely to end up with a bell-curve. And where will you find yourself?
Well, if you are somewhat like me, I'm sure it will be somewhere
close that crowded median. Repeat the exercise with another virtue.
Again, most likely, you will be loafing around close to the median.

Again, if you are like me and every
other mediocre person, every single day or your life, you aspire –
no, agonise – to break free of your mediocrity. You too, at least
sometimes, dream of being a star.

Stars
are those who once, at least once, become the best in something.
Their glitter may fade after a period – brief or long. Rajesh
Khanna was a star. He shone bright for a while, and faded away into
oblivion, to come back briefly once more to the limelight when he
died. But we have others like Gandhi, Einstein, Vinci, Tolstoy etc.
whom people will probably never tire of talking about. Their stardom
may go. With time, they may even get surpassed by someone else in
their achievements. But the stories of their achievements endure well
beyond the relatively brief period of their stardom. These are
legends.

Legends are legends because they
somehow end up doing something which changes the world. But you don't
need to change the world to be a star. You don't need to invent a
medicine for AIDS. You don't need to sacrifice your life for the
freedom of your nation. You don't need to reveal to the world the
metaphysical secret behind their living and dying. You just need to
take something – however trivial, however insignificant, however
irrelevant to the current concerns of people – and become good at
it. You have to be so good that you become a benchmark in that. The
importance of your achievement isn't in the choice of what you have
done, but to what extent you went in perfecting your ability to do
it. A person who has trained himself all his life to swim as fast as
anyone can – which will hardly ever mean anything for the
alleviation of one man's misery – becomes a Michael Phelps. Someone
specialising in painting horses, naked dieties, and erotic scenes
involving them becomes a reverred as well as controversial artist.
There seem to be seemingly an infinite number of things to choose
from to achieve your stardom.

And
yet, stars would probably make a meagre 0.00000001% (I typed a string
of zeros that just looked long enough; don't read too much into it)
of the population. Legends make up a vanishingly tinier fraction of
that. Rest of populations constitutes of wannabes and losers.

Then
why on Earth, like me, does every mediocre person perhaps wants to
become a star, knowing full well that, by the very definition of the
term, stars will always constitute a minuscule part of the
population? Logically speaking, the probability of success in
becoming one is that much small for all of us. But still we keep
trying and trying and trying.

Trying
endlessly is one thing. But we go beyond that. We hate ourselves, our
lives, everything until we get stardom in at least something. We call
ourselves mediocres, losers. The wish to be a star has probably
brought out the best in a bunch of people. But for the remaining
teeming millions, it makes life a hellish business.

The
world is fully justified in celebrating its stars, in worshipping its
heroes. Because heroes line the limits to which humans are capable of
going in the infinite space of activities. But it's a sheer tragedy
that the remaining population, which does the very important task of
filling up the space in between these boundaries, frets and whines
about getting there at the boundary at least once, to get a photo
taken of themselves in that moment of stardom, and to think of that
brief moment as the summary of their life. How much more stupid could
humanity get?!

How
can 70-80 years of living be about vying for a moment of glory that
mostly doesn't come? And even if it does, what value does it really
have if earned through mere suffering, not just of the self, but of
innumerable others trying uselessly to clinche that moment. That
moment becomes precious, often not by its intrinsic value, but by the
very fact that most won't get it. Just as gold is considered more
valuable than iron because very few have it. I don't fully understand
the logic behind considering something valuable merely because it's
rare. And yet, I know, that's what we humans keep doing.

Tell
me, isn't it a huge, colossal mistake? I know, humanity has been
committing it since ever, and is probably cursed genetically to
continue committing it forever. Yet, I don't think Phelps could have
made it if swimming hadn't given him a day to day sense of
well-being. I can't imagine M. F. Hussain churning out so many
paintings till the last day of his long life without each painting
giving him the pleasure of having said something of his own. Phelps'
best laps can't be his medal-winning ones. Hussain's best paintings
may never have been sold.

Feeling
of worth is a very private feeling. Experience of beauty is a very
solitary experience. It doesn't get displayed to a clapping audience;
it can't be auctioned to rich bidders. And those moments of beauty
are the blessings we all humans have got, whether we are stars or
mediocres. The privilege to create is afforded to every one of us.
That privilege is available each and every moment of our life. The
principle output of that creation is the experience of creating. Not
how it changes the world, or how people clap, or how much it is sold
for. The reason for an act of creation is fulfilled much before it
ever comes before any audience, at the very moment of its happening.
And that fulfilment doesn't depend on whether you are a star or a
mediocre. It just asks you: did you feel the joy? Did you feel it
enough?

The
thought of being mediocre is a liberating one in a sense. It frees
you from the pressure of trying to be the best, the first, the
quickest. We know that the burden of changing the world is not on our
shoulders. Being mediocre, you can just focus on what you like doing,
and enjoy yourself. What the world wants to make out of your work is
purely their worry. From your perspective, it's at best a side effect
of your actions. Beyond the condition where the world perceives it
practically worth their while to let you exist, I don't think you owe
anything to it. Your life is yours to live. Your strengths are yours
to use; your frailties are yours to fight.

Also,
every one of us isn't born to paint a Mona Lisa, to discover the laws
of motion. OK, if fixing that broken tap in your house is the best
thing you can do at the moment, why not do it and feel as happy?
That's your contribution to making the world a better place (and for
sure, for your wife this contribution will count more than Newton's
laws of motion). So, why be judgemental?